The present invention relates to user interfaces.
A user interface (“UI”) provides a communication link between a user and a data processing application such as a software application. In the user interface, the software application presents information to the user and the user provides input to the software application. The user interface specifies a set of commands or menus to receive instructions from the user. A typical personal computer (“PC”) application uses a graphical user interface (“GUI”) that displays dialogs, menus or user selectable icons on a display device such as a cathode ray tube (“CRT”) or a liquid crystal display (“LCD”) monitor. The user enters the commands or selects menus or items from the menus using input devices such as keyboards or pointing devices, for example a mouse. A keyboard or a pointing device is a highly flexible tool that can be used to enter detailed information or select from a large number of options. The large number of options or other information can be simultaneously presented in the user interface by the PC application, because PCs typically use display devices having high-resolution screens that the users view from a relatively short distance.
Non-PC applications, however, have user interfaces that are often restricted to use smaller display resolution or less flexible input devices than those available for PC applications. In “living-room” applications, the user interface presents information on a display screen of a TV set or another display device that is viewed from a larger distance and is traditionally controlled by a remote control. Because of the larger viewing distance, menu items and icons should be larger for a living-room application than those for a PC application. Thus living-room applications can simultaneously present only a small number of options in their user interface. Furthermore, traditional TV remote controls have a limited number of control functions and much less flexibility than a keyboard or a mouse. For example, the mouse allows random navigation to any of the presented menu items, while a TV remote control is often limited to sequential navigation where a single button press can reach only a next or a previous menu item. User interfaces are also limited in hand-held devices such as mobile phones in which the display has a small resolution and no pointing device is available.
User interfaces are often used to organize, view or manage digital images or other digital objects. A digital object is a collection of digital data that includes content and metadata. Typically the digital object has been created to represent the information in the content, and the metadata corresponds to information about the content or its representation in the digital object. The content can represent images, sound tracks, animations or video, and the metadata describes how the content is formatted, what is the content about, or when or by whom the content was collected or stored. For example in a collection of digital photographs, each photograph has typically metadata that specifies when the photograph was taken. In addition, the metadata can include user defined tags to indicate the subject, the corresponding event or other context of the photograph.